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Molly White

"While more of the is becoming accessible to people with low-end connections, more of the web is becoming inaccessible to people with low-end devices even if they have high-end connections."

@danluu on web bloat: danluu.com/slow-device/

mollywhite.net/micro/entry/202

danluu.comHow web bloat impacts users with slow devices

@molly0xfff @danluu Personal opinion: I think RAM usage and screen size are also critical metrics.

Outside of egregious cases (my nemesis YouTube chat, advanced web applications), you can wait for a page to load and get on with your life (or what time remains of it).

But if Firefox uses all your RAM rendering a downscaled 4000 px wide high definition logo and crashes, or if your screen is 75% header bars, 25% footer bars, and 0% real content, that's completely disruptive.

@molly0xfff @danluu not surprising considering all that is being used for the formatting of the sites.

@Phosphenes @molly0xfff @danluu
Some Marketing people sold my boss a website which plays a 40mb video in the backgroud, when you load the website.

The video is just boring stock footage, that brings nothing but clutter to the site (and about 10 sec loading time...) and stops after 40 secounds.

But my boss loves that video, so I can`t get rid of it. My points about loading times and accessabilty were of course ignored...

@Phosphenes @molly0xfff @danluu I believe Slack is 50mb of JS alone. The modern web is just so far gone.

@molly0xfff @danluu finally someone calls out codinghorror on his qualcomm bullshit . Alas, this platform is much bigger :(

@molly0xfff @danluu the #Enshittification of the #Web is inherently bad and I think it's overdue we don't accept websites that don't work over #Iridium and #FrogFind...

@molly0xfff @danluu great stats!
this has definitely been my experience - when i replace old computers, it's because web apps like google maps are no longer usable on them.

@molly0xfff @danluu
Sadly some sites feels heavier to navigate at than games!
That using old notebook metrics, which is my case, sadly.

@molly0xfff @danluu

Another thing to look at is the Javascript bloat.

Not only does that waste more cpu, but it also wastes bandwidth, which becomes a tax on users that have to deal with data caps.

[This post created on a low ram slow device using recycled bits]

@molly0xfff

in 1988 my old school's network shared storage had 20Mb of capacity

@molly0xfff @danluu I wonder if Decentraleyes / LocalCDN alleviates the bloat significantly

@impossibleibex @danluu @molly0xfff It reduces the downloads required, but the execution has the exact same overhead as before unless you block some scripts beforehand.

@danluu important info, but the article is incredibly difficult to read. A huge wall of type. Legibility is also an accessibility issue.

@chrisaraymond @danluu To be able to read the article I had to resize my window to make it narrow. It would have been trivial to add just a bit of CSS to produce a legible layout for both desktop and mobile, but there's a kind of aggressive purist that wants to write web pages like it's 1995 and thinks attractive (or even usable) layout smacks of corporate marketing.

@not2b Exactly! I transitioned into design from journalism, so my bias has always been communication first. I taught myself CSS and responsive design, and the basics of good web typography. Sadly, too many degreed designers just don't seem to care or to want to learn how to design for digital, even in 2024.

@molly0xfff @danluu as a professional web dev and maintainer of a niche video game wiki, I pride my site on being very lightweight, but after a brief loading test it turns out I have some work to do 😅 Gotta shout out lazy loading images, deferring scripts, and the details HTML element

@molly0xfff @danluu And that goes for the entire computing panorama. Most of the thousand-fold increase in computing power that we've had since the times of the Commodore 64 and the DOS computers has gone into developing bloat - either to make things marginally easier for developers at the expense of RAM and storage, or (more recently) to appease shareholders by adding new sources of revenue to any given app. About the only places where performance is considered relevant anymore are video game consoles and supercomputers - and even there I've seen bloat creeping in throughout the years! Not to be a boomer, but there's a reason why limitations breed creativity